Dec. 4, 2006 — Neanderthals had different ethnic groups, often suffered from starvation, and probably practiced cannibalism. That’s the news from a recent study of the skeletal remains from eight Neanderthals who lived 43,000 years ago in northwest Spain.
The findings, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, raise questions about Neanderthal lifestyle. Why, for instance, would they have resorted to cannibalism? What harsh conditions caused the wear and tear evident on surviving bones?
There are two possible reasons why Neanderthals would have dined on their dead, according to lead author Antonio Rosas, a scientist in the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.
"One is that they needed to eat whatever was at hand, including human flesh, because ecological conditions for their survivorship, such as extreme cold weather and no meat from hunting, were really hard," Rosas told Discovery News. The other possibility, she said, is that "this was done in the context of something we may think of as symbolic."
Rosas suggested the virtual absence of animal remains at the site — a cave called El Sidrón — may point either to ritual killings or unsuccessful hunting. Neanderthals are thought to have subsisted primarily on meat.
The eight Neanderthals studied ranged in age from infancy to young adulthood. Their teeth revealed that tooth growth often stopped abruptly due to illness or malnutrition. Adolescence in general appears to have been a particularly hard time, possibly due to separation from parents and the resulting need for self-sufficiency.
Cut marks associated with butchery were found on some of the remains, particularly those of the younger individuals.
The skeletal remains also revealed that these Neanderthals possessed a different bone structure than individuals found elsewhere in Europe. It appears that Neanderthals fell into at least two basic ethnic groups that coincided with their north-south geographical distribution.
Southern Neanderthals from the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, the Middle East and Italy had broader and shorter faces than northern Neanderthals from populations living north of the Pyrenees, the Alps, portions of Asia and central and eastern Europe, Rosas and his team determined.
